CULTURAL MEMORY AND CONSTRUCTED ETHNICITY IN VERGIL’S AENEID
Tedd A. Wimperis
A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of Classics.
Chapel Hill 2017
iii ABSTRACT
TEDD A. WIMPERIS: Cultural Memory and Constructed Ethnicity in Vergil’s Aeneid
(Under the direction of James J. O’Hara.)
This dissertation examines the ways in which the Aeneid’s fictionalized ethnic
communities—principally the Trojans, Carthaginians, Latins, and Arcadians—construct and promote their collective identities, and how members of these groups employ memory and identity in political rhetoric. Building on theoretical and comparative sources on ethnicity, national identity, and cultural memory, this study shows that the depiction of ethnic identity and communal politics within the world of the poem corresponds closely with real practices among ancient Mediterranean communities, most pertinently Augustan Rome. Like their historical counterparts, the epic’s fictive communities employ cultural memory and identity in several political activities, including diplomacy, elite self-representation, and public displays. Vergil’s characters also appeal to shared identity and values to mobilize collective action, reinforce group solidarity, and legitimize political decisions or leadership. The
dissertation applies this evidence to a broad literary analysis of the Aeneid and a re-evaluation of its engagement with contemporary Augustan ideology.
Chapter 1 introduces the dissertation’s thesis and place in current scholarship on Vergil, and examines the Aeneas myth in the Republican and Augustan periods as a case study of cultural memory’s role in politics and propaganda. Turning to the epic itself, Chapter 2 elaborates the evidence for cultural memory and identity among the Aeneid’s four major
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Completing this dissertation was only possible through the encouragement and expertise of generous advisors, friends, and family. First and greatest thanks go to Jim O’Hara, who guided me in shaping this project from its initial fits and starts to its finishing touches; I could not have hoped for a more attentive, knowledgeable, and supportive mentor. I thank also the remaining members of my committee, Bob Babcock, Bill Race, James Rives, and Sydnor Roy, who have greatly enriched this study with their care and insight, and have helped make the last two years of writing a smooth, constructive, and altogether pleasant experience.
Many friends at UNC-Chapel Hill have contributed to the progress of this dissertation, and to my own wellbeing as I was writing it. A few words among these acknowledgments cannot begin to express my gratitude for their daily reassurance, cheerfulness, inspiration, and kindness, now and during all of my years at the university. Special thanks go to Kim Miles, who at every step provided crucial research incentive in the form of donuts, cookies, cakes, pies, and brownies. In addition to the constant support I have received from the Department of Classics throughout my graduate career, a year-long
fellowship from the Graduate School has allowed me the time and resources needed to complete the dissertation, for which I am grateful.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: THE POLITICS OF THE PAST IN THE AENEID AND AUGUSTAN
ROME...1
Memory and Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean ...4
Genus unde Latinum: The Aeneas Myth in Roman Politics ...20
The Memory of Aeneas in Public Discourse: Three Aspects ...37
Conclusion and Prospectus ...48
CHAPTER 2: CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE WORLD OF THE AENEID ...53
Cultural Memory and Identity in Vergil’s Ethnic Communities ...57
The Trojans ...57
The Carthaginians ...69
The Latins ...78
The Arcadians ...87
Memory and Identity in State Diplomacy ...107
Conclusion ...116
CHAPTER 3: VERGIL’S TROJANS: CRISIS, IDENTITY, AND CONTINUITY ...125
The Trojan Experience of Exile ...130
Visions of Troy: domus or imperium? ...159
Conclusion ...181
CHAPTER 4: RHETORIC AND RESISTANCE: CONSTRUCTED ETHNICITY IN VERGIL’S ITALY ...183
Italian Identity in the Late Republic: Tota Italia and Its Complications ...186
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Trojan Resistance and Italian Solidarity ...214
Conclusion ...237
CONCLUSION ...241
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CHAPTER 1: The Politics of the Past in the Aeneid and Augustan Rome
Vergil’s Aeneid recounts the birth of a civilization, narrating through the deeds of “father Aeneas” and the Trojan settlers of Lavinium the earliest origins of the Roman people. The story of the Trojan migration to Italy was one of many cultural narratives about the past that
underpinned the Roman sense of self, situating the origin of the community in mythic time, identifying its genealogy through a line of communal ancestors, and defining its core values through the deeds of its early heroes. The Aeneas myth constitutes an ancient example of what modern scholarship now recognizes as “cultural memory,” the repository of myths, symbols, traditions, institutions, and historical experiences through which the members of a community construct their collective identity. Growing to special prominence in the Age of Augustus, the Aeneas myth was widely celebrated in civic monuments, literature, and public displays. Its protagonist, the alleged ancestor of Augustus himself, was regarded as the progenitor of the Roman people and a model of the Roman character, and the story of his foundation became enshrined as a premier myth of the empire.
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alliances, hostilities, and territorial claims. It informed political decision-making and discourse on cultural values by providing, in the form of ancestral heroes, exemplary ideals of character. It conferred legitimacy on contemporary authorities and their policies through their perceived alignment with the imperatives of the communal past. Vergil’s epic, a rendition of the traditional myth that achieved the status of canon, played an essential role in both the reception and
transmission of this narrative of Rome’s collective past, a narrative which, under the reign of Augustus, buttressed a political and cultural program that advanced the restoration of Romans’ native values, the solidarity of the Roman people through shared heritage, and their unique identity and destiny among peoples.
The cultivation of the Aeneas myth among Romans and its pragmatic functions in their political activity exemplify the use of cultural memory in constructing communal identity, promoting solidarity, and motivating collective action and belief. The social dynamics and political efficacy of memory and identity, demonstrated here in the example of a prominent Roman myth, are the themes that guide this study of the Aeneid. In this dissertation I aim to show how the roles of cultural memory and identity attested in Vergil’s first-century milieu are equally at work within the fictive landscape of his poem, reproduced, as if in miniature, among the communities of Trojans, Carthaginians, Latins, and Arcadians that inhabit its mythic world.
The subjects of memory and identity in the Aeneid have long been studied in connection with Vergil’s Roman audience. My approach, by contrast, turns from the contemporary world outside of the poem to the world inside of it, to the poet’s creative rendering of a mythic past populated by the Trojan exiles and the several peoples they encounter in the narrative. Like their real-life counterparts, the Aeneid’s ethnic groups preserve the memory of their own communal
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and public displays, and rhetorically appeal to their collective identities to mobilize action, encourage conduct faithful to ancestral exempla, and legitimize political authority.
Among Vergil’s Trojans, memory of the founders Teucer and (especially) Dardanus guides their effort to found a new settlement. Through Dardanus’ origins in Italy, the refugees are able to recognize Latium as an authentic patria, a land connected with their Trojan identity as the birthplace of their communal founder. Dido and her Carthaginian settlers, themselves
refugees, commemorate the recent founding of their new state in North Africa, as well as their ethnic origin from Tyre. At the state banquet held for the Trojans, the narrator describes a silver dish that depicts the exploits of Dido’s father Belus and the founding fathers of the Phoenician race, and the queen pours a libation with a chalice passed down through this long line of ancestors.
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Beginning with this and other evidence, this dissertation examines the influence of a community’s collective past, preserved in its cultural memories and other markers of identity, on the actions, motivations, and emotions of Vergil’s characters within the Aeneid. Applying to the poem a new interpretive focus and critical framework, I argue that cultural memories function among the Aeneid’s fictionalized ethnic groups in much the same ways as they do among
real-life ancient communities. Like the Aeneas myth among Vergil’s contemporary Romans, these memories shape collective identity, guide political decisions, legitimize power, motivate action, and inspire solidarity. Through analysis of cultural memory and identity within the Aeneid’s
poetic microcosm and in the historical Greco-Roman world it reflects, this study defines a further way in which the epic creatively engages with contemporary political and cultural discourse.
This introductory chapter will, in its first half, lay the methodological groundwork for the dissertation, surveying its foundations in cultural theory and situating its place in current
scholarship on Vergil. In the chapter’s second half, I initiate my analysis of the poem by exploring in greater detail the major point of contact I will draw between the discourses of identity in the Aeneid and those in the Roman world outside of the poem, namely the Aeneas myth. Study of that myth’s political uses in the Roman world before and during Vergil’s time will develop an interpretive framework for examining cultural memory within the poem in subsequent chapters, and further elaborate this dissertation’s two main subjects of inquiry: first, how communities construct their identities through cultural memory, and, second, how they make strategic use of memory and identity in their public life.
Memory and Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean
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Writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Maurice Halbwachs laid much of the
groundwork for the study of memory as a collective, socially-constructed phenomenon. His three works on memory, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte (1941), and, published posthumously, Étude de mémoire collective
(1950), located individual memory within a social framework that, through constant communication with the individual’s acts of remembrance, actively conditions one’s own
perceptions of the past. In Halbwachs’ scheme, individual recollection “depend[s] on intercourse, within the context of an existing social frame of reference and value. There is no memory
without perception that is already conditioned by social frames of attention and interpretation.”1
The notion that memory is conditioned in a social context entails its subjectivity, and highlights its liability to be constantly readapted and reinterpreted. Recollections of the past are always rooted in the present, the locus of construction and reconstruction: “even at the moment of reproducing the past our imagination remains under the influence of the present social milieu.”2
Since the publication of Halbwachs’ work, the concept of collective memory has been the subject of much further refinement, expansion, and application in diverse fields of study. His initial observations on memory as a facet of social psychology laid the groundwork for others to develop a cohesive theory of culture, which over the past several decades, including the
“memory boom” of the 1970’s, has further expanded in the scope and depth of its extent.3
1 Assmann (2011), 22.
2 Halbwachs (1992), 49, excerpted and translated by Coser from Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire; see 46-51 on
“The Reconstruction of the Past.”
3 Assmann (2011), 21-33 summarizes Halbwachs’ main contributions; for the development of memory studies since
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The study of collective identity, especially as concerns political communities, has been a particularly important locus of interaction with Halbwachs’ model of memory. The intersection of collective memory and collective identity has borne fruit in work on the sociocultural
dimensions of contemporary and pre-modern nationalism, among whose chief interpreters are John Armstrong and Anthony D. Smith. Both are exponents of the ethnosymbolist approach to nationalism, which locates the basis of nation-states and national identity in the myths,
memories, symbols, cultural practices, and perceived kinship relations shared among members of a particular ethnic community. While some scholars of nationalism—the “modernist” school, which includes Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson—see the phenomenon of national
identity as dependent on strictly modern factors, and therefore uniquely modern, ethnosymbolists see the components of national consciousness active also among ethnic communities in the Middle Ages and antiquity.4
Armstrong’s 1982 Nations Before Nationalism explores the components of national consciousness among individuals, the “cement that has maintained group identity over very long periods of time.”5 A foundational process in defining the identity of specific groups, according to
his schema, is the demarcation of ethnic boundaries: perceived similarities and distinctions among peoples underpin a sense of solidarity among group members who claim a common
relationship between collective memory and myth production, see Bell (2003). On the study of memory applied to the Aeneid, see below, 16-17.
4 For a summary of the debate on the origins of nationalism and its different factions, see the first chapter of Smith
(1999), 3-27. Representative works of modernists include Anderson (1983) and Hobsbawm (1992). Smith (1986), 21-125 and (2004) assess the presence of “national” sentiments in pre-modern times. Though Smith is clear that ancient Greece and Rome did not constitute “nations” as we mean the term today (Smith 2004, 131-32), his observations on ethnicity have proven applicable to studies of Greco-Roman identity, as well as studies of Latin literature, such as Shumate (2006). Garman (2007), contributing to an edited volume on ethnosymbolism, focuses specifically on the relevance of the theory to the ancient Mediterranean. Smith’s ideas have been especially influential on Jonathan Hall’s writings about ethnicity in the Greek world (see below); cf. Farney (2007), 26-34, discussing both Smith and Hall in the context of ethnic identity among Roman Republican elites.
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cultural or biological character.6 Armstrong stresses that ethnic identity is supported, in the long term, by nonmaterial factors: “The primary characteristic of ethnic boundaries is attitudinal. In their origins and in their most fundamental effects, ethnic boundary mechanisms exist in the minds of their subjects rather than as lines on a map or norms in a rule book.”7 This “attitudinal”
conception of group identity relies on a communicative network of shared symbols—ranging from words to images and music—to express boundaries between one’s own group and others. Networks of symbols integral to the self-conceptualization of the group crystalize into myths, whose recital “arouse[s] an intense awareness among the group members of their ‘common fate.’”8 The myths told and retold by a people, which enshrine in narrative form the symbols that
define their ethnic identity, both create solidarity and reinforce the boundary between Self and Other.
Approaching these same questions, Antony D. Smith has written most influentially on the role of communal myths and memories in shaping collective identity and influencing political activity.9 According to Smith, the narratives of the cultural past perform a vital role in defining
the group’s sense of self and others. They are social symbols “which endow popular perceptions of ethnic boundaries and identities with meaning and sentiments, and which mediate changes in
6Ibid., 4-6. Armstrong builds on the work of the anthropologist Fredrik Barth, who emphasized the role of
boundaries in constructing ethnic identity; see Barth (1969). The concept of boundaries between Self and Other in the ancient world is pervasive, but perhaps best expressed in the concept of the barbarian, for which see esp. Hall (1989). I remark more on the concept of boundaries in ethnic identity in the fourth chapter of this dissertation.
7 Armstrong (1982), 7-8.
8Ibid., 9. Armstrong further discusses myths in connection with imperial ideology in 129-67; see also Smith (2015)
for Armstrong’s views on myth and identity.
9 “Myths of common ancestry” are one of six features identified by Smith as essential to ethnic identity; another is
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those identities set in motion by external forces.”10 Stories about the past also anchor the values
and worldview of communities:
In the shape of the ancient heroes, they give us our standards of collective morality; in the promise of new modes of solidarity and fraternity, they provide cures for our homelessness and alienation; in the return to primordial origins of kinship, they seem to minister to our need for security.”11
In the sphere of political belief, argumentation, and action, the collective past can thus be an active and productive force in human societies:
The past is not some neutral terrain to be explored and dissected; it is the locus of
exempla virtutis, of the sacred, of the ancestral homeland, of the golden age, and of communal authenticity and identity. The past embodies the peculiar values and traditions of the community, without which there could be no nation and no national destiny.12
Recent work by classicists and historians on ethnic and political identity in the ancient world has further elucidated the singular importance of perceived kinship among group members in generating identity and solidarity. Narratives about the past mediated how members of ancient communities understood their relation to one another. Chief among such narratives were myths of foundation, which commemorated the group’s inception by a founder who was revered as the common ancestor of his people.13 Such “descent myths,” or “myths of common ancestry” were
10 Smith (1999), 57. 11Ibid., 88.
12 Smith (1998), 115. On contemporary examples of myth and memory in the promotion of national consciousness
and political directives, see Hosking & Schöpflin (1997), Stråth (2000), Leoussi & Grosby (2007), Langenbacher & Shain (2010), and Bouchard (2013); these works are representative of a growing bibliography. Paralleling the work of the ethnosymbolists, comparative mythologists and political philosophers have also identified the unique importance of narratives about a community’s shared past in public discourse, terming these narratives “political myths.” Henry Tudor (1972), Christopher Flood (1996), and Chiara Bottici (2007) have produced major accounts of the subject, each treatment bringing its own observations and philosophical apparatuses to bear in defining and explaining political myths.
13 On foundation myths in antiquity, see most recently Mac Sweeney (2015) and Angelova (2015); also Gruen
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pervasive among ancient societies, and, as Emma Dench describes, were the substance of defined ethnicities in antiquity:
Mythological genealogies were the broad common ‘language’ of ethnic identity in the ancient Mediterranean world. Notions of shared origins and of descent from gods and heroes delineated human groups of all kinds, including families, clans, tribes, and urban communities. Mythological genealogies were the ‘language’ in which kinship, distinction, differentiation, and ethnic plurality were regularly articulated, in which the world was mapped and selves were located throughout the Mediterranean world. This ‘language’ was intensely discursive, lending itself well to the creation of alternative versions, to change, invention, and reinvention, and to multiple means of cultural expression, from cult to painting, to sculptural reliefs, poetry and prose.14
The construction of ethnicity among ancient peoples has been the subject of several important studies.15 Jonathan Hall’s work on ethnic identity in Greece especially emphasizes the role of communal myth in the definition of distinct groups. Hall largely agrees with Smith’s account of ethnic identity, and gives pride of place to the myths that reinforce ties of kinship between members of the group: “it must be the myth of shared descent that ranks paramount among the features that distinguish ethnic from other social groups, and, more often than not, proof of descent will act as a defining criterion of ethnicity.”16 Among the ancient Greeks, “the primary constitutive elements in the construction of ethnic consciousness were not behavioral but discursive, articulated through myths of ethnic origins which spoke not only of ethnic ancestors but also of primordial territories.”17 Hall stresses that this idea of kinship was putative and, from
14 Dench (2005), 12.
15 There is now a substantial bibliography on ethnicity and identity in the ancient world; scholarship most valuable
to this dissertation includes Hall (1997, 2002), Isaac (2004), Gruen (2011), and the edited volume of McInerney (2014). Ancient testimonia for ethnicity and ethnography is collected in the anthology of Kennedy, Roy, & Goldman (2013). Bickerman (1952) is a foundational study of ancient approaches to the origins of ethnic groups. Lindner (1994) explores the role of myth in ethnic identity in imperial Asia Minor, emphasizing evidence from material culture. On Roman and Italian ethnic identity, especially in the Republican era, see esp. Dench (2005), and Farney (2007), with additional bibliography in Chapter 4 of this dissertation.
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a scientific standpoint, fictive; the community existed as a sentimental and cultural, not a biological, entity, and an individual’s qualification as a member was judged by primarily nonmaterial factors.18 Above all it was the shared ancestry preserved in cultural memory that oriented the community’s sense of self, acting as “the instrument by which whole social collectivities could situate themselves in space and time.”19
Irad Malkin and Carol Dougherty have approached the relation between memory and identity by looking at specific kinds of ethnic narratives, those pertaining to travel, founding, and colonization. Malkin’s 1998 The Returns of Odysseus addresses “how myths…were used to mediate encounters and conceptualize ethnicity and group identity in the Archaic and Classical periods,” especially as this process involved narratives of the nostoi of Homeric heroes.20 Dougherty examines colonization stories from an anthropological and narratological standpoint, evaluating the role that these stories played in cultural negotiation and the representation of identity. These narratives held ongoing relevance for the Greek societies who commemorated them, for whom the colonial past could guide, explain, and justify the present:
Although they describe the past, colonization tales must also respond to the needs of the present: the significance of the narrative depends less on an accurate reflection of facts than on internal coherence and continued cultural value. As a result, historical, literary, mythical, and legendary material are combined as needed to represent and legitimate action.21
Like the myths of common descent highlighted by Smith and Hall, these colonization tales, in Dougherty’s reading, exerted significant influence in the political life of the Greek communities who preserved them in their collective past.
18 See esp. Hall (2002), 9-17. 19Ibid., 41.
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Another branch of classical scholarship has focused on the specific use of cultural memory in diplomatic engagements in the Greco-Roman world, where myth often supplied a mediating device in encounters between peoples. The mythology shared by ancient communities allowed them to lay claim to territory through ancestral ties, form alliances based on mythical kinship or friendship, or call in favors through obligations owed from primeval times. Jones (1999) and Patterson (2010) have written the most detailed studies about “kinship diplomacy,” a concept now widely recognized in literature on ethnicity in the ancient world; the wealth of examples in Erich Gruen’s Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (2011) further illustrate the centrality of mythic genealogies to cultural negotiation and appropriation throughout the
Mediterranean.22 It was through memories of founding, colonization, and descent from common ancestors that diverse cultures recognized both themselves and one another, and in this way the communal pasts of Mediterranean societies played a substantial role in the international politics of antiquity.
But it is not only the past that shapes the present; the opposite is equally true. The importance of a community’s shared history in cultural interaction and political activity endows the past with strategic value. By spinning narratives of the past in an advantageous way,
emphasizing, suppressing, or outright inventing certain events or characters of communal history, whole communities could derive diplomatic benefit and enhance their prestige, while political leaders could win support for their policies or bolster their claim on power. The ability of the past to be readapted continually according to the exigencies of the present is a feature of collective memory recognized as early as Halbwachs, and, as much evidence from across the ancient world attests, such reconstruction lent itself easily to deliberate, even tendentious efforts
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to satisfy pragmatic goals.23 Terming the subjective accounts of a community’s past constructed through its myths “intentional history,” H.-J. Gehrke (2007) describes the capacity of individual communities to adapt creatively or fully invent aspects of their history in order to serve present political needs, using as a case study the Magnesians, who industriously wove their communal history into the narratives of other states in order to win favor among major powers in the Hellenistic world.24 On a smaller scale, the same tendency motived Roman elite families of the late Republic to begin tracing their history back to an eponymous Trojan ancestor, promoting the antiquity of their line as the Aeneas myth gained cultural capital in Roman society.25
While the scholarship enumerated in this survey has dealt largely with memory and identity in the Greek world, the same patterns are also attested among the Romans. Rome’s was a culture steeped in memory of the past, a past reverently maintained in sites, monuments,
buildings, honorific devices, and traditions.26 The widespread advertisement of ancestral exempla
inthe public and private spheres—in visual display, political rhetoric, and literature—epitomizes the Romans’ deep investment in both the cultivation of memory and its practical use in
23 On the strategic use of appeals to myth, cultural memory, and ethnic kinship in the Greco-Roman world, see Hall
(1997, 2002, 2007); also Gruen (2011). Hobsbawm & Ranger (1983) has examined influentially how modern societies also employ the past in creative ways for political goals.
24 On the Magnesians, see Gehrke (2007), 287-97. Hall (1997), 38 remarks on the importance of mythical
genealogies and the demonstration of συγγένεια in diplomacy, and acknowledges that “appeals to kinship can always, of course, be a matter of pure invention.” The most significant use of mythic genealogy among the Romans involved their Trojan ancestry, treated at length below. Curty (1995) compiles Greek epigraphic sources in which συγγένεια is invoked.
25 See below, 31-32, on the “Trojan families.”
26 Studies of memory and identity in Rome constitute an abundant bibliography. The edited volumes of Citroni
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transmitting cultural identity and values.27 As much as their Greek neighbors, Romans conceived of themselves and their world through narratives about the communal past, and the common store of these narratives provided the fund from which political elites often drew to win support and promote policies.
I have aimed to show with this limited review of scholarship the prominence of one feature of ethnic and political discourse among ancient societies: the fundamental importance of a community’s shared past both in its conceptualization of self and others, and in its influence on political activity. Interest among classicists in the Aeneid’s engagement with Roman memory
and identity has proliferated in recent decades, and has now been the topic of several books and articles, especially the work of Katharine Toll (1991, 1997), Clifford Ando (2002), Yasmin Syed (2005), Joseph Reed (2007), Aaron Seider (2013), and Kristopher Fletcher (2014). The
contributions of Toll, Ando, and Fletcher share an emphasis on historical context in interpreting the epic, which they read in part as a discourse on Roman identity that responds to the
momentous social and political changes of Vergil’s era. Toll attempts to reconcile “light” and “dark” readings of the poem’s ideological allegiances by shifting focus away from Vergil’s presentation of Augustus to his vision of the Roman “nation” that Aeneas is building.28 After the
recent experience of the Social Wars, as the idea of Rome grew to encompass the Italian city states alongside the imperial center,
the common national identity of Romans and Italians together, if there was to be such a thing, would have to be created new… Vergil seized on the occasion to conceive of Roman Italians as a new entity, to frame for this new citizenry a new
27 On exemplarity in the Roman world, see esp. Bell & Hansen (2008), Roller (2004, 2009), and, in Roman poetry,
Seo (2013) and Goldschmidt (2013), esp. 149-54.
28 Toll (1991), 3: “The Aeneid was not made to express any simple partisanship, but precisely to deter partisan
splintering from hindering its dream of ideological unity and ethical endeavor for the whole of Roman Italy. The
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myth of nationhood, and, by means of his myth, to endow posterity with power to sponsor and guide and ameliorate yet further new conjunctions.29
The ambiguities of Vergil’s poem are thus, in Toll’s view, deliberately calculated to
accommodate multiple perspectives, and encourage shared participation in the project of building Rome’s future. As a Mantuan who had not begun his life as a Roman citizen, Vergil was well poised to ask the question of what constituted Roman identity; in exploring the question, he crafted a response which “propounds no specific models,” but “indicates that answers are continually to be supplied and revised, and the search is unremitting.”30
Ando’s 2002 article “Vergil’s Italy: Ethnography and Politics in First-Century Rome” also reads the Aeneid against the backdrop of the Social Wars. Perceiving, like Toll, that the assimilation of Italian communities into Rome’s civic constitution occasioned a reevaluation of Roman identity, Ando develops two different ideas advanced by prominent Latin authors who both originated from outside Rome: Cicero and Vergil. In contrast to the Ciceronian formulation of Italian identity, advanced in De Legibus 2.2-5,31 that Roman Italians have two distinct
patriae—the patria naturae, their place of origin, and the patria civitatis, meaning Rome—Ando explores an alternative formulation shared by Augustus and Vergil, “that Rome and Italy were an inseparable unity.”32 Building on the work of both Toll and Ando, Fletcher too asserts that the
Aeneid “responds to this…need for national self-definition through investigation of the nation’s past” in light of changes in Roman and Italian identity.33 Fletcher’s study turns attention to the
29 Toll (1997), 41. 30Ibid. (1991), 7.
31 Cf. Fletcher (2014), 4-7.
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Trojans’ voyage from Troy to Italy, and highlights the transition of identity that accompanies their physical journey from one patria to another, “the process by which Aeneas falls in love
with Italy before even arriving there and what this love means for both Aeneas and Vergil’s audience.”34
The volumes of Syed (2005) and Reed (2007) also treat identity in Vergil’s Aeneid, both engaging the literary-critical heuristic of the gaze. Syed is primarily concerned with how Vergil’s text shaped Roman identity through its readership, on the levels of both “the self” and “the collective”—the latter term indicating the socially-conditioned categories of ethnicity and gender. As Vergil’s readers identify with the gaze of the fictional characters within the Aeneid, and draw out similarities and distinctions between themselves and the characters, “the poem constructs its version of the reader’s individual self…and further defines this individual self in terms of collective determinants such as gender and ethnicity.”35 Through the reader’s interaction with the text on a subjective basis, Roman identity is delineated along boundaries of self and other, male and female.
Reed also investigates how the epic conceptualizes Roman identity, and sees the demarcation of ethnic boundaries as a key part of that process, but stresses the impasse that results from defining a national identity through contrast with other nationalities. Reed argues that Vergil’s poem characterizes Roman identity as a fundamentally unstable construct,
predicated on comparison with other national identities whose boundaries are constantly shifting
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and ill-defined.36 Because its formulation rests on such unstable ground, Reed suggests, Roman identity is merely “provisional and perspectival,”37 lacking any real definition of its own:
Roman identity—always reducible to some other nationality, depending on where the poem draws the boundary between nations—emerges as a synthesis…of other national identities; …there is no essence, no absolute center, no origin that exclusively authorizes Romanness.38
While these scholars have provided much of the foundation on which this dissertation builds, points of departure between their work and my own lie in the identities to be elaborated, and the features of those identities to be explored. Focusing primarily on how Vergil’s epic conceptualizes what it means to be Roman, these studies read the poem in terms of its
contribution to, or critique of, Roman and Italian identity. Owing to this focus, they address the transmission of the collective past largely with respect to the Aeneid itself, a literary monument of cultural memories integral to the formation of Roman identity. My own study, by contrast, asks how the Aeneid’s fictionalized communities understand and express their own collective identities, and how those identities influence their sentiments and actions as political bodies through the course of the text. I am most interested in the ways in which Vergil’s ethnic groups inside the world of the poem preserve and transmit their own communal memory, and put it to use in the service of present exigencies.
This dissertation has also benefitted from scholarship on other topics central to my thesis. Recent work on memory in the Aeneid has shown the complexity of the characters’ engagement
36 Reed (2007), 1: “The present study, through close reading of the text, looks at the way the Aeneid offers the
readerly subject a national identity—which the teleology of the poem invites us to read as Roman—through comparisons and contrasts between other nationalities (especially Trojan, Carthaginian, Italian, and Greek).” See also Reed (2012), which summarizes much of his 2007 book, and Bernstein (2008) 167-68, who makes similar remarks on the fluidity of ethnic identity in the poem.
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with the past, particularly in the case of the Trojans who must come to terms with the loss of their homeland. Among these works, Aaron Seider’s Memory in Vergil’s Aeneid(2013) has contributed most to my own reading of the poem, as I share Seider’s methodological focus on the subjective construction and adaptation of memory among Vergil’s characters.39 Cultural memory
in Republican Rome is a major focus of Nora Goldschmidt’s volume on Ennius and Vergil,
Shaggy Crowns (2013), which addresses the role of the two poets in shaping and transmitting core narratives of the Roman past. Research on genealogies and kinship in the Aeneid by Nakata, Hannah, and others account for the ways in which Vergil’s characters construct individual and collective identity through personal lineage or myths of common descent, and also exploit or strategically “engineer” their genealogies for practical advantage.40 Horsfall, Thomas, Syed, and
Reed have richly contributed to the study of ethnography in the poem, both on Vergil’s use of source material as well as his characters’ application of recognizable ethnographic tropes to define Self and Other.41
Alongside secondary literature on the Aeneid itself, I have also had recourse to studies of Roman cultural memory in the material record of the Republican and Augustan eras, as part of this dissertation’s aim to draw connections between the discourse of identity and memory within the poem and the world outside of it. Artistic and epigraphic evidence for the Aeneas myth is one primary focus of this research, as I use the dynamics of this myth, in the latter half of this
39 Quint (1982, 1993), Henry (1989), Hardy (1991), Berlin (1998), Most (2001), Scarth (2008), and Meban (2009)
also address aspects of memory in Vergil. The majority of these studies (Quint, Henry, Hardy, Most) deal primarily with the poem’s acts of commemorating and forgetting in light of Augustan ideology and the history of the civil wars; they do not, however, address memory’s political and cultural dimensions and their implications for the
Aeneid’s fictive communities. Berlin (1998) links Aeneas’ memory of Troy’s fall with his attack on Latinus’ capital
in 12.554-60. Scarth (2008) focuses on mnemotechnics and the composition of memory in the Aeneid. Meban (2009) examines cultural memory in the Eclogues, a project with insights transferable to Vergil’s later work.
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chapter, as a case study of how the communal past shapes cultural and political discourse across generations. A second category of evidence pertains to Italy itself, as the fourth chapter of this dissertation deals with Vergil’s depiction of Italy in Aeneid 7-12 and its connection to the rhetoric of tota Italia current in the first century BCE; this discussion builds principally on the work of Ando (2002), Dench (2005), and Bispham (2007).
As this dissertation engages, in some dimensions, with the poem’s relation to Augustan ideology, it owes much to the foundational work of Otis, Parry, Putnam, and others who have set the field for discussion on both sides of the “light” and “dark,” pro-Augustan and anti-Augustan sides of the debate.42 My own viewpoint has most in common with recent studies that see
Vergil’s text as “optimistic” and “pessimistic” simultaneously, as expressing not just Parry’s two voices, but multiple voices operating in a tense unison.43 But the argumentative thrust of this dissertation does not emphasize one ideological reading of Augustus over another. While I make the case that the Aeneid mirrors aspects of Augustan culture in how its fictive communities utilize their shared past, the attitudes of the poet toward the princeps himself are secondary considerations. My aim is rather to explore a previously unexplored locus of interaction between Vergil’s literary world and the contemporary milieu that exists outside of the text, namely the discourses of cultural memory which actively influence the beliefs and activities of political communities.
42 On the debate between the “Harvard” and “European” schools of interpretation, see Johnson (1976), Harrison
(1990), Schmidt (2001), and Conte (2007), 150-69; Toll (1991), 12 supplies a useful bibliography of major publications from critics on both sides.
43 For this position, see esp. Conte (2007), 150-69: “Virgil’s undertaking is configured as a system shot through with
tensions, a system within which greater and lesser contradictions oppose each other and, through their development, dynamically determine the meaning of the whole” (169). Toll (1991) also aims to accommodate both the
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Although this study does not directly assess Vergil’s presentation of Augustus, it also does not interpret his replication, within the poem, of real forms of ideological discourse—those on which Augustan ideology especially relied—as a neutral commentary on contemporary political rhetoric. The calculated interpretation of the community’s past to suit the needs of political argumentation in the present—what Gehrke has termed “intentional history”—is at work in Vergil’s Rome no less than in the ancient world as a whole, and this tendency in the promotion of cultural memory is not lacking among the characters of the Aeneid. At the same time as Vergil creates fictional communities that commemorate their past in ways analogous to those of real-world Mediterranean societies, he also shows that political elites can alter, suppress, and invent aspects of the past in order to achieve practical goals. Drawing attention to the
instability of the communal past, the poem exhibits the ways in which leaders can invoke a people’s shared identity and history in arguably contrived, even coercive ways, wielding them as ideological tools of persuasion and legitimation.
Vergil’s “commentary” on the use of cultural memory and identity in political
propaganda is rendered all the more complex by the fact that his very own poem, in which these tendencies toward manipulation of the past are exemplified, is itself engaged in crafting a vision of history that places the Augustan regime and its values at the center of Roman identity. In fact, hardly any cultural product of the principate so successfully popularized the Augustan
interpretation of Rome’s origins and identity as did the Aeneid, and, whatever the poet’s private
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dramatizing both the power of such rhetoric and the instabilities that inhere within it, even while participating in the very same type of discourse.
I conclude the review of this dissertation’s place in scholarship with a summary of its main goals. What this study aims to contribute to Aeneid scholarship is a more comprehensive assessment of how the ethnic communities depicted by Vergil employ their shared past to address present political needs. This includes not only surveying the evidence for ethnic identity in the Aeneid, but also taking stock of how identity is preserved and transmitted by members of each community, what practical and sentimental functions it can serve, and how certain elements of a communal past can be deliberately emphasized, neglected, invented, or altered for pragmatic purposes. At the same time as it examines cultural memory within the poem, this study also aims to compare its expressions in the Aeneid with the real-life dynamics of memory and identity in the epic’s contemporary context, exploring areas of correspondence that have gone largely unnoticed in previous scholarship. This study does not aim to offer a new perspective on the Roman identity of Vergil’s audience, as other recent commentators on the Aeneid, cited above, have done, but rather to show how the transmission, expression, and political uses of identity at work in Roman public discourse are mirrored within the fictional world of the poem. The interpretive frames of cultural memory and ethnic identity provide new avenues for reading the motivations, goals, and rhetoric of Vergil’s characters, and illuminate another dimension of the
Aeneid’s engagement with political and cultural discourse in the ancient world.
Genus unde Latinum: The Aeneas Myth in Roman Politics
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politics of the Republican and Augustan eras.44 The survey has three purposes: first, to examine in closer detail the multiple roles that cultural memory can play in the real political sphere; second, to demonstrate the power of cultural memory to motivate action and belief among members of a community; and third, to show how not only the significance, but even the content of a specific memory can gradually shift over time, owing to its strategic deployment in political argument and the varied contexts of its implementation. In the chapters that follow, the
framework developed here will guide an approach to the myths and memories shared among Vergil’s fictionalized Trojans, Carthaginians, Latins, and Arcadians.
From as early as the sixth century BCE, a number of traditions were in circulation among Greek, Sicilian, and, later, Roman intellectuals regarding the Trojan presence in Italy. The Sicilian poet Stesichorus may be the earliest literary source for Aeneas’ arrival on Italian shores, though our only evidence that his lost Ilioupersis contained this tradition is a much later and contested witness, the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina.45 In prose, Hellanicus of Rhodes is the earliest known historian to mention Aeneas in Italy, in a fragment preserved by Dionysius of
44 Literary and material evidence for the Aeneas myth in Republican and Augustan Rome has attracted much
scholarly comment over the past century. I have benefitted most from Galinsky (1969a), Horsfall (1987a), Gruen (1992), Erskine (2001), and Battistoni (2009, 2010). Gabba (1976) remains an important foundational treatment of the myth in the third and second centuries. Evans (1992), treating Roman political propaganda, devotes a chapter to the Julian appropriation of the myth. Wiseman (1974) and Rose (2008) discuss the display of Trojan ancestry among elite families under the Republic. Prag (2010) focuses on kinship diplomacy between Sicily and Rome, Russo (2014) on the myth’s role in Roman intervention in Asia Minor. On the transmission of the myth in the early Republic, see Erskine (2001), 146 n. 71, who summarizes the positions of the main commentators on the issue.
45 This marble tableau of scenes in relief from the fall of Troy was produced in Italy around 15 BCE, and cites with
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Halicarnassus. If Dionysius’ attribution is correct, Hellanicus has Aeneas found Rome after arriving in Latium together with Odysseus; Aeneas founds the city of Rome, naming it after a Trojan woman named Rhome.46 The Sicilian Alcimus, writing perhaps in the late fourth century, has the union of Aeneas and a woman named Tyrhennia produce a daughter named Alba, who in turn gives birth to Rhomus, the eponymous founder of Rome.47 The poet Lycophron also attests to the tradition that names Odysseus as Aeneas’ companion, though in his account Aeneas founds Lavinium, not Rome.48 Other variants support the Trojan identity of Rome, but exclude Aeneas from the happenings in Italy altogether: the Sicilian Callias, in the third century,
attributed the city’s founding to the triplets Rhomus, Romulus, and Telegonus, the offspring of a marriage between the Trojan woman Rhome and King Latinus.49 These accounts are only a small portion of the wide array of variants acknowledged in the Greek and Sicilian traditions.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ account of Rome’s founding and the beginning of Plutarch’s Life of Romulus describe even more versions of the Trojan foundation narrative.50
Material evidence for the Aeneas myth’s presence in Italy in the early centuries of the Roman Republic centers on Etruria and Lavinium. In Etruria, several artistic depictions and epigraphic attestations of Aeneas have been found; while some of these artifacts have been
46 Dionysius, Ant. Rom. 1.72.2. On this variant of the founding myth, see Gruen (1992), 17-18. On the grounds that
Rome, still a small state in the fifth century, would probably not have attracted the attention of Hellanicus at such an early date, Gruen doubts the veracity of Dionysius’ attribution of the story to this author, favoring a later attribution. A version of the story involving the woman Rhome who burns the ships appears in Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, 1.2-4.
47 Gruen (1992), 15; Erskine (2001), 151-52, with bibliography.
48Alexandra 1226-80; see McNelis & Sens (2016), 204-217 on Lycophron’s Aeneas narrative and its relation to
Vergil’s later iteration.
49Ant. Rom. 1.72.5. Cf. Gruen (1992), 15-16 and Erskine (2001), 151-52.
50Ant. Rom. 1.72-73; Plutach, Romulus 1-2. See also the surveys of Gruen (1992), 31-44 and (2011), 243-49 on the
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dated, not without dispute, to as early as the seventh century BCE, most come from the late sixth and fifth centuries.51 Etruscan black- and red-figure vases depicting the flight of Aeneas from Troy with Anchises are the most prevalent of these finds. Votive terracotta statuettes of this scene have also been found at Veii, dated to the fifth or fourth centuries.52 But while these
artifacts show the prevalence of the Aeneas story in Etruria, they give us no real indication of how the myth was viewed among Romans in this period. Lavinium was a Latin city connected with Aeneas in the tradition as early as Lycophron’s Alexandra and the Sicilian historian
Timaeus, who reports that a Trojan earthenware vessel (κέραμος Τρωικόν) was kept by the locals among the city’s sacred objects.53 But excavations there have yielded little firm evidence as to
the city’s early association with the Aeneas myth.54
From the third century forward the record becomes clearer, for in this century, with the growth of Rome’s influence on the international stage, the Trojan foundation myth gained prominence in political and diplomatic affairs. It is worth noting, however, that the impetus for invoking the Aeneas myth comes largely from Greek and Sicilian communities, and not yet the Romans themselves. According to the literary record, the first of these communities was the court of Pyrrhus of Epirus, who in the late 280’s was readying his offensive against Rome. In Pausanias’ account of the Tarentine embassy to Epirus seeking war, Pyrrhus, whose line traced its descent back to the Aeacidae, imagines his military campaign as an encore of the Trojan War:
51 See Galinsky (1969a), 122-28; Horsfall (1987a), 18-19, who disputes the seventh century date of an Etruscan
oenochoe depicting Aeneas; Gruen (1992), 21-22.
52 Galinsky (1969a), 133-34; Gruen (1992), 22.
53 Timaeus’ report is preserved by Dionysius, Ant. Rom. 1.67.4; see the discussions in Galinsky (1969a), 155-57 and
Erskine (2001), 144. Dionysius seems to identify the κέραμος with the Penates that Aeneas brought from Troy, although, as Erskine notes, it is not clear that Timaeus had also made that identification.
54 On the excavations in Lavinium and their findings, see Galinsky (1969a), 141-61; Horsfall (1987a), 15-17; Gruen
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When the envoys urged these considerations, Pyrrhus remembered the capture of Troy, which he took to be an omen of his success in the war, as he was a descendant of Achilles making war upon a colony of Trojans.55
Better attested than any such propaganda from Pyrrhus is the role of the Trojan past in relations between Rome and the Sicilian town of Segesta. Both communities traced their
foundation back to the Trojan refugees, and thus considered one another as kin through common ancestry.56 Events precipitating the First Punic War occasion the earliest recorded expression of their mythic kinship, as it was allegedly on this basis that the people of Segesta, the Elymians, threw their allegiance to Rome after violently revolting against Carthaginian control:
...Segesta [the Romans] took without resistance; for its inhabitants because of their relationship with the Romans—they declare they are descended from Aeneas— slew the Carthaginians and joined the Roman alliance.57
The perceived kinship relation between Romans and Elymians is widely acknowledged outside of this account. Already in the fifth century, Thucydides (6.2.3) records the Elymians’ legendary Trojan origins, and the eponymous founders Elymos and Aigestes (Latinized as Acestes, as in the Aeneid) appear alongside Aeneas in various accounts of the founding of Segesta and Eryx, the two main settlements of the Elymian people.58 Perhaps as early as the third century, coins
55 Pausanias 1.12.2, trans. Jones (1918). Erskine (2001), 157-61 resists the idea that Pausanias’ account reflects
actual Pyrrhic propaganda, on the grounds that this passage represents the sole source for the idea that Pyrrhus ever invoked Troy in the war against Rome, and, in Erskine’s view, the story is probably an embellishment, “the product of later literary imagination” (157). Battistoni (2010), 82-83 defends the validity of Pausanias’ account.
56 See Prag (2010) for an historical overview of the kinship claims between Sicily and Rome.
57 Zonaras 8.9, trans. Cary (1914). The Byzantine chronicler Zonaras is our only source for the Elymian appeal to
kinship in this event, and, although he is considered to be a reliable witness of lost material from Cassius Dio, his twelfth-century date and the lack of corroborating evidence for this motivation for the Elymians’ actions have raised dispute over his testimony; cf. Erskine (2001), 181-82.
58 Galinsky (1969a), 77 n. 39 enumerates further literary attestations of the Elymians’ Trojan descent. On Aigestes
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were struck in Segesta advertising the image of Aeneas carrying Anchises on the reverse.59 The importation of the cult of Venus Erycina into Rome in 217, discussed below, was likely based on the notion of kinship between the two peoples. Centuries later, in the trial of Gaius Verres in 70 BCE, the Trojan origin of the Elymians permitted Cicero to represent the governor’s plundering of Segesta as an offense against not just innocent provincials, but kin of the Roman people.60
Another account from the third century is illustrative of the range of forms that appeals to mythic kinship could take. In 237, the Greeks of Acarnania also invoked the Romans’ Trojan past to strengthen a diplomatic bid. The Acarnanians apparently could not argue convincingly for Trojan kinship with the Romans, as the Elymians of Sicily might have done. Instead, they
claimed that their ancestors had demonstrated goodwill toward the Trojans: they had been the only Greeks to not participate in the Trojan War.61
In the late third century, Rome imported two foreign cults that evoked Trojan ancestry: Venus Erycina from Sicily and the Magna Mater from Pergamum. Both events have been cited by scholars as reflective of Rome’s growing interest in its Trojan past, as a turning-point at which Romans began to avow publicly their Trojan heritage on their own initiative.62 Venus’ shrine in Eryx was kept by the Elymians, and the Magna Mater was especially associated with
59 The third century date has support, but is disputed. Cf. Erskine (2001), 182, with bibliography on the debate; he
favors a later date.
60 Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.72, 2.5.83, 2.5.125; discussion in Erskine (2001), 178-80 and Battistoni (2010), 121-23. 61 The embassy is preserved in Strabo (10.2.25) and Justin (28.1-2). Strabo claims that the bid was for “autonomy;”
Justin, that it was for protection from the Aetiolians. Dionysius (Ant. Rom. 1.51.2) records that a group of
Acarnanians led by Patron aided Aeneas on his journey; see also 40-41 below on the tradition of Acarnanian aid to Aeneas.
62 On the importation of Venus Erycina and the Magna Mater, see Galinsky (1969a), 174-77; Gruen (1992), 46-47;
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the environs of Ilium on the Troad. The traditions of Trojan kinship between the Romans and Elymians most likely motivated the importation of Venus Erycina, whose temple was dedicated in 215 BCE; she received another temple near the Porta Collatina in 181. The installation of the Magna Mater in 204 also resonated with Rome’s Trojan identity, but seems to have depended on other motivating factors. In negotiations between Rome and Attalus I of Pergamum to bring the goddess to the West, the Romans’ mythic ancestry facilitated diplomatic exchange; but once the goddess was brought to Rome there is little to suggest that her cult was celebrated in the city as a symbol of Trojan identity at that time.63
Outside the contexts of diplomacy and cult, Livy records a curious instance from the late third century that may also reflect the ascendancy of Trojan identity in Rome. In the year 212, hexameter verses composed by a certain vates named Marcius were discovered, one of which was revealed to have predicted the battle of Cannae before its occurrence, and opened with the admonition amnem, Troiugenae, fuge Cannam.64 With no corroborating evidence of this acount, it is difficult to make much of Livy’s report; the popularity of the Aeneas myth in his own lifetime could arguably have influenced his recording of the Marcian prophecies. If his report is to be trusted, however, the reference to Troiugenae would accord with the demonstrably greater interest in Rome’s Trojan identity both at home and abroad in the later third century.
As the second century sees ever greater interaction between Rome and the Greek East, our evidence for the political use of the Aeneas myth, especially in diplomatic exchanges, increases correspondingly. By this time, Romans are more proactive in advertising these mythic origins, a trend attested by two dedications made by Titus Flamininus at Delphi and Olympia
63 Cf. Erskine (2001), 218, 223.
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following the battle of Cynoscephalae in 197. The dedicatory inscriptions publicly assert the Roman people’s descent from Aeneas and the Trojans.65
A well-documented event from the beginning of the century provides an exemplary case of kinship diplomacy dependent on the Aeneas myth. In 197/6, a delegation from Lampsacus journeyed to Massalia and Rome to seek Roman friendship and protection, probably against the expansion of Antiochus III. The details of the embassy are recorded in an inscription of the 190’s dedicated to the delegation’s leader, Hegesias.66 According to this document, the demonstration
of ancient kinship with the Romans, whose Trojan ancestors would have neighbored Lampsacus in the Troad, was key to the embassy’s diplomatic strategy. The ambassadors visited first with Lucius Flamininus, who was commanding the Roman fleet in Greece, before journeying to Massalia, where they sought an introduction to the Roman senate. Here, too, their argument was predicated on kinship, as Massalia and Lampsacus both had originated as Phocian colonies. As per the delegation’s request, the Massalians formally introduced the Lampsacans to the senate in Rome and vouched for their cause. The ambassadors pled their case before the senate and secured the provisions hoped for; following this, they returned east and met with Titus Flamininus in Corinth to take care of all additional matters. On the basis of ancient kinship between the peoples of Lampsacus, Rome, and Massalia, the ambassadors could argue that the proper obligations of kin toward kin necessitated these communities’ mutual support for one another. The drafters of the commemorative inscription for Hegesias made sure to record not only that the embassy had succeeded, but that the Romans had looked favorably on their claims of kinship.
65 The inscriptions are cited by Plutarch, Flamininus 12.6-7; see also Erskine (2001), 41-42.
66I.Lamp 4; SIG 591. The inscription is reproduced in Curty (1995), 78-82, with French translation and discussion;
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An embassy of Delians to Rome in the 180’s BCE bears mentioning as another variant of this form of diplomacy.67 Where the Lampsacans had invoked συγγένεια with the Romans, a relationship of blood-ties through ancient kinship, the Delians invoked οἰκειότηςbetween
themselves and the Romans, implying an historical bond of hospitality and goodwill between the communities.68 The inscription commemorating the Delian embassy is dated to the first half of the second century, with a terminus ante quem of 167 BCE. The inscription is fragmentary, and provides little detail about the aim and content of the mission, but does mention, crucially, that the delegation appealed to φιλία καὶ οἰκειότης that existed between the peoples of Rome and Delos.69
Better known and of greater historical significance was the importance attached by Rome to the city of Ilium itself, which traced its history back to the original Homeric settlement. Especially during and after the Augustan age, the city enjoyed exceptional status among provincial cities, including tax exemption and frequent imperial benefaction.70 It is difficult to tell when Rome’s special regard for Ilium first developed, but evidence exists from as early as the late third and early second century, the time of Rome’s increasing interaction with other cities of the Troad, including Lampsacus. Suetonius’ life of Claudius records that the emperor, who promised the Ilians tax immunity on the grounds that they were the “founders of the Roman
67 The embassy is recorded in a damaged inscription, IG 11.4.76; see discussion in Erskine (1997) and (2001),
185-89, and Battistoni (2009), 90-92.
68 On the terminology of kinship diplomacy, see the comprehensive treatment of Curty (1995), 215-41; Jones
(1999), 6-16 provides an accessible summary. See also Battistoni (2009), 89-92 and Patterson (2010), 13-16.
69 Another claim of mythic kinship, perhaps originating from the latter half of the second century, existed between
the Romans and Samothracians, predicated on the identification of the Penates with the Samothracian Great Gods. Servius, commenting on Aen. 3.12, attests to this belief: Dii Penates a Samothracia sublati ab Aenea in Italiam advecti sunt, unde Samothraces cognati Romanorum esse dicuntur. See Battistoni (2009), 92 (in English) and, more comprehensively, (2010), 128-37.
70 For the relationship between Rome and Ilium from Republican through imperial times, see esp. Jones (1999),
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race,” once produced an old letter in Greek written by the senate to “King Seleucus” that
guaranteed friendship between their states should the king leave the Romans’ kin, the Ilians, free from taxation.71 If this letter were genuine, and the identity of the “King Seleucus” in question was Seleucus II Callinicus, who ruled from 246-225 BCE (thus Battistoni) or even Antiochus III, from 222-187 BCE (thus Erskine), this gesture of συγγένεια between Rome and Ilium would be the earliest document of a relationship between the cities.72
The visits of two Roman generals to Ilium, first Gaius Livius Salinator, then the consul Lucius Cornelius Scipio, are firmly dated to 190 BCE.73 Both offered sacrifice to Athena Ilias during their visits before bringing their forces further eastward. Both Livy and Justin liken the ecstatic joy of the Romans and Ilians upon their meeting to the reunion of long-separated relatives.74 The extent to which genuine Roman reverence for their mythic homeland motivated these events is subject to debate; there was sure strategic advantage in the display of kinship with the people of the Troad, especially in the context of military intervention in Asia Minor.75
Whatever the reasons for its establishment, the Romans seem to have had, by this time, a standing relationship with the Ilians, for in 188 BCE, when the Lycians were fearing Roman
71 Suetonius, Divus Claudius 25.3.
72 See Erskine (2001), 172-75 and Battistoni (2009), 81-83, (2010), 86-87 on the reliability of the alleged letter and
the identity of the king.
73 The visits are reported by Livy (37.9.7, 37.37.1-3) and Justin (31.8.1-4).
74 Justin’s account is illustrative: “Preparations for a contest were in consequence made on both sides; and when the
Romans, having entered Asia, had reached Troy, mutual gratulations took place between the Trojans and the Romans; the Trojans observing that ‘Aeneias, and the other leaders that accompanied him, had gone forth from them;’ the Romans telling them that ‘they were their children;’ and such joy was among them all as is wont to be between parents and children met after a long separation. The Trojans were delighted that their descendants, after having conquered the west and Africa, were now laying claim to Asia as their hereditary domain, remarking that ‘the ruin of Troy had been an event to be desired, since it was so happily to revive again’” (trans. Watson 1853). Cf. Erskine (2001), 234-36, who suggests that Livy and Justin perhaps retrojected Augustan and imperial interest in the Aeneas myth onto this early event.
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retribution for their support of Antiochus, they appealed to their neighbors the Ilians to intercede with Rome on their behalf. The effort at reconciliation met with success, at least in the short term.76
Relations with Ilium again become prominent a century later, in 85 BCE, in a surprising turn of events. In the waning years of the First Mithridatic War the city was subject to aggression by the Roman army of Gaius Flavius Fimbria in Asia, perhaps because it had sympathized with Mithridates. The Ilians sent word to Sulla, who was operating in Greece, asking for his
protection from Fimbria; Sulla replied that the city would be under his care, and that the Ilians should report this new arrangement to Fimbria. Fimbria, however, gained entry to the city and razed it, against Sulla’s will. Later sources universally condemn the act as akin to parricide, but no contemporary accounts of the event survive, rendering it difficult to gauge how the sack of Ilium was received by most Romans at the time.77
Sulla’s opposition to Fimbria’s advance against Ilium can be contextualized with evidence that may indicate his own promotion of the Trojan myth. During his campaigns in the East, his cultivation of Aphrodite, mother of Aeneas, as his patron deity—most visibly indicated by his epithet Epaphroditos, which he popularized in his dealings with Greeks, and which the senate formally awarded him in 87—may indicate that the memory of Troy played some role in his own self-representation.78 The fact that Sulla staged the Lusus Troiaein Rome (the first
76 For concise treatments of this affair, see Erskine (2001), 176-78, and Battistoni (2009), 87-89. Battistoni (2010),
166-86 assesses not only this event but Lycia’s ties with Troy and Rome in greater detail.
77 The sack of Ilium in 85 is recorded by several later writers, including Livy, Appian, Cassius Dio, and Augustine;
for sources and analysis see Erskine (2001), 237-45, who questions the actual extent of the damage inflicted by Fimbria.
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recorded Roman to do so) would support this notion.79 If the historian Appian were relying on Republican sources, perhaps even Sulla’s own extensive commentarii, when he recounted the oracle that Sulla receives from Delphi upon his visit to the shrine, the following passage from his
Civil Wars would offer even more compelling evidence:
πείθεό μοι, Ῥωμαῖε. κράτος μέγα Κύπρις ἔδωκεν Αἰνείου γενεῇ μεμελημένη.
Hearken to me, O Roman. Great power on the race of Aeneas, Cherishing them with her care, has Cypris conferred.80
Sulla’s self-promotion as the favorite of Venus, which may also have evoked Rome’s origins from Aeneas and Troy, reflects a new trend in the Roman circulation of the Trojan foundation myth. Where the use of the myth appears in earlier centuries, it is only in the public contexts of statecraft, diplomacy, and cult; even when the myth was invoked by individuals, as Titus Flamininus did in making his dedications at Delphi, the individual spoke on behalf of the Roman people who corporately shared the heritage of Troy. In the first century, however, the myth gains wider currency in the personal propaganda of aristocratic families. By this time the story of the Trojan founding had already attained an important place in Roman cultural memory, at least among the political and intellectual elite. Citations of the Aeneas myth in the poetry of Naevius, Ennius, Accius, and Lucretius, and the prose of Fabius Pictor, the elder Cato, Varro, and Sallust, among several others, attest to its integration into high literary culture.81 In tandem with the proliferating interest in the Trojan past, certain families sought to trace their genealogies
79 Plutarch, Cato Minor 3.1; cf. Horsfall (1987a), 23 and Erskine (2001), 244 n. 88.
